銅頭鐵腦蓋 Born With A Bronze Head
大聖笑道：「你不知。老孫是：大圣笑道：「你不知。老孙是：
逐句解 Line by line
The Great Sage laughed: "You do not know."
Four characters, and they are the cue for a poem. Every recitation in this chapter is prefaced by somebody being told they are ignorant.
Old Sun is this:
The tag, which may never be parted from the lines it introduces.
Born with a bronze head and an iron brain-pan, such as heaven and earth have not in all the world.
乾 is qián here, the hexagram of Heaven, because 乾坤 is the pair Heaven-and-Earth. It is the one reading of this character that is not gān, dry — and the chapter has used the dry one three times already. Five lines of seven and seven, rhyming throughout on the 魚模 group, the -u family.
Axes cannot chop nor hammers break it; in my young days I went into Lord Lao's furnace.
不得碎 puts 得 in the light de, the cannot-manage-to grammar. 老君爐 is the crucible of Laozi, deified as the Supreme Ancient Lord — the alchemical furnace Wukong was sealed in for forty-nine days after heaven ran out of other ideas. He came out harder than he went in, and with the fire-proof eyes he has been using all chapter.
The answer to the demon's astonishment is an autobiography. Wukong does not say his head is hard; he explains, in verse, the manufacturing process — and every item in it is something heaven did to him while trying to execute him.
The furnace is the key exhibit. Heaven put him in an alchemical crucible to reduce him to ash, and instead tempered him. It is the book's neatest statement of a recurring idea: every punishment inflicted on this creature has made him harder to punish.